40 
SCOUTING FOR GIRLS 
you want to study them more, walk behind them ; you can learn 
just as much from a back view, in fact more than you can from 
a front view, and, unless they are scouts and look round 
frequently, they do not know that you are observing them. 
“War scouts and hunters stalking game always carry out two 
important things when they don’t want to be seen. 
Background . — One is — they take care that the ground behind 
them , or trees , or buildings , etc are of the same colour as vheir 
clothes. 
“Freezing .” — In that way a scout, even though he is out in the 
open, will often escape being noticed. This is called by scouts 
“Freezing.” 
And the other is — if an enemy or a deer is seen looking for 
them, they remain perfectly still without moving so long as he 
is there. 
Tracking . — The native hunters I:i most wild countries follow 
their game by watching for tracks on the ground, and they be- 
come so expert at seeing the slightest sign of a footmark on the 
ground that they can follow up their prey when an ordinary 
civilized man can see no sign whatever. But the great reason 
for looking for signs and tracks is that from these you can read 
a meaning. It is exactly like reading a book. You will see the 
different letters, each letter combining to make a word, and the 
words then make sense ; and there are also commas and full- 
stops and colons ; all of these alter the meaning of the sense. 
There are all little signs which one who is practised and has 
learnt reading makes into sense at once, whereas a savage who 
has never learned could make no sense of it at all. And so it is 
with tracking. 
TRACKING. 
“Sign” is the word used by Guides to mean any little details, 
such as footprints, broken twigs, trampled grass, scraps of food, 
old matches, etc. 
Some native Indian trackers were following up the footprints 
of a panther that had killed and carried off a young kid. He had 
crossed a wide bare slab which, of rock, of course, gave no mark 
of his soft feet. The tracker went at once to the far side of the 
rock where it came to a sharp edge; he wetted his finger, and 
just passed it along the edge till he found a few kid’s hairs 
sticking to it. This showed him where the panther had passed 
down off the rock, dragging the kid with him. Those few hairs 
were what Guides call “sign.” 
This tracker also found bears by noticing small “sign.” On one 
occasion he noticed a fresh scratch in the bark of a tree, evidently 
made by a bear’s claw, and on the other he found a single black 
hair sticking to the bark of a tree, which told him that a bear had 
rubbed against it. 
